touchscreen

Laptops equipped with touch screens on the rise, IHS says

In response to falling prices, nearly 25 percent of all laptops should have touch screens by 2016, IHS said Wednesday.

Windows 8 is the first version of Microsoft's popular operating system that works well with touch. The technology has been promising, and many companies have vowed to make more products with touch screens. But so far, high pricing and low supply have limited the number of touch-based PCs on the market.

IHS said global shipments of notebooks equipped with touch screens should jump to 78 million units in 2016, up from 4.6 million in 2012. This year alone, … Read more

Designers craft fashion furniture from Lenovo tabletop PCs

The dream of having large-screen interactive touch table computers in every home has taken its sweet time at becoming reality. Maybe it's the cost of the technology, or the lack of a good place to put it. Lenovo seems to think it may also be a matter of furniture fashion.

To spice up the home table PC concept, the company commissioned three unique takes on integrating its $1,700 IdeaCentre Horizon Table PC into the home environment. The designs range from the whimsical to the practical.… Read more

Windows 8 touch ultrabooks see price cuts at Microsoft Store

Touch ultrabooks are seeing decent price cuts at the Microsoft Store, making these expensive models a bit more affordable.

Touch-screen laptops are generally priced significantly higher than non-touch models, as the screens have been expensive to procure.

The well-received Acer Aspire S7 has seen one of the steepest discounts, falling to $1,299 from $1,649.

The S7 features a 256GB solid-state drive, a 13.3-inch 1,920x1,080 resolution display, and a 1.9GHz Intel Core i7-3517U processor.

Next up, Sony's Vaio T Series 13 has been reduced to $999 from $1,299. That 13.3-inch touch model … Read more

Watch a device add a virtual touch screen to paper

We're inching closer to a paperless existence, but until then, a new image-processing development by Fujitsu could make it astonishingly simple to copy content from paper and turn it into digital data.

Merely relying on an ordinary camera and projector, Fujitsu's touch-based interface makes quick work out of copying printed text or images by simply requiring the user to drag across content with a fingertip. The projector shines an illuminated frame that dynamically resizes based on how far the finger travels, and the observing camera scans, crops, and turns that selection into a digital file -- in just a few seconds.… Read more

Vizio welcomes spring with new Windows 8 touch-enabled PCs

Welcome to the third generation of Vizio PCs. You won't find many things different technology-wise in this round compared with previous models. The biggest news is that the laptops -- two 14-inch, and two 15.6-inch models -- all ship with touch screens now. Vizio's all-in-ones already had touch screens, but this generation gets a CPU bump, and higher prices to match. Vizio has also added wireless networking adapters that support the new 802.11ac standard across the lineup.

For the laptops, the 14-inch Touch Thin+Light CT14T-B0 comes it at the lowest price, going for $1,089.… Read more

Razer Edge review: The Swiss Army gaming tablet

Take a Windows 8 tablet. Add Nvidia graphics. Mix in a snap-on controller. Toss in a TV-friendly dock. Suddenly, what was a gaming PC in theory can become a console; step back, and a tablet becomes a gaming handheld.

This is the promise that the Razer Edge provides: a Surface for the gaming set, if you will. It's a novel idea that no one else has made tangible yet, and the Razer Edge stands alone in that regard.

At its heart, the Razer Edge is a 10-inch Windows 8 tablet with either a Core i5 or i7 processor, like … Read more

Microsoft cuts Windows 8 OEM prices to spur demand -- WSJ

Microsoft is aiming to amp up demand for Windows 8 notebooks by offering manufacturers a discount on the operating system, the Wall Street Journal has reported.

Based on comments from "people familiar with the situation," the Journal yesterday said that Microsoft is trimming OEM (original equipment manufacturer) prices for Windows 8 and Office 2012. The goal is to encourage device makers to develop smaller, touch-based laptops designed for the latest Windows version.

Sales of Windows 8 computers have been weak since the OS debuted last October. Conventional desktops and most laptops still lack the touch screens needed to … Read more

Google said to release touch-screen laptop this year

As the divide between laptops and tablets continues to shrink, word is that Google has already developed its first Chrome-powered touchscreen laptop.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the tech giant's new device would come with cloud computing and could go on sale as soon as this year.

This endeavor would put Google in closer competition with Microsoft, which has already developed its own Windows touch-screen laptops. According to the Wall Street Journal, 25 percent of all Windows 8 laptops sold in the U.S. last month had touch screens.

Microsoft also has a major claim on the low-cost … Read more

High-end aspirations unmet in HP Envy 23 all-in-one

You can't blame computer makers as they try to shake off the low margin shackles of the commodity PC market. It's reasonable, though, to ask that they put out a product worthy of a premium price tag.

The touch-screen version of the Envy 23 line starts at $1,049, but HP submitted a $1,949 version for review. The implication is that that HP wants you to think of this PC as a serious computer for performance or home entertainment. The problem is that its distinguishing features, Windows 8 Pro and 16GB of RAM, are easily added to … Read more